My Mother
Pieced Quilts
-Teresa Paloma Acosta
1 they were just meant as covers
2 in
winters
3 as
weapons
4 against
pounding january winds
5 but
it was just that every morning I awoke to these
6 october
ripened canvases
7 passed
my hand across their cloth faces
8 and
began to wonder how you pieced
9 all
these together
10 these
strips of gentle communion cotton and flannel nightgowns
11 wedding
organdies
12 dime
store velvets
13 how
you shaped patterns square and oblong and round
14 positioned
15 balanced
16 then cemented them
17 with your thread
18 a steel needle
19 a thimble
20 how the thread darted in and out
21 galloping along the frayed edges, tucking
them in
22 as you did us at night
23 oh how you stretched and turned and
re-arranged
24 your michigan spring faded curtain pieces
25 my father’s santa fe work shirt
26 the summer denims, the tweeds of fall
27 in the evening you sat at your canvas
28 - our cracked linoleum floor the drawing
board
29 me lounging on your arm
30 and you staking out the plan:
31 whether to put the lilac purple of easter
against the red plaid
32 of winter-going-
33 into-spring
34 whether to mix a yellow with blue and white
and paint the
35 corpus Christi noon when my father held
your hand
36 whether to shape a five-point star from the
37 somber black silk you wore to grandmother’s
funeral
38 you were the river current
39 carrying the roaring notes
40 forming them into pictures of a little boy
reclining
41 a swallow flying
42 you were the caravan master at the reins
43 driving your threaded needle artillery
across the mosaic
44 cloth bridges
45 delivering yourself in separate
testimonies.
46 oh
mother you plunged me sobbing and laughing
47 into
our past
48 into
the river crossing at five
49 into
the spinach fields
50 into
the plainview cotton rows
51 into
tuberculosis wards
52 into
brains and muslin dresses
53 sewn
hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of 25 years
54 stretched
out they lay
55 armed/ready/shouting/celebrating
56 knotted
with love
57 the
quilts sing on
